


the one who has to climb

by ataxophilia



Series: the aim of falling (is to fly) [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 19:09:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5260283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ataxophilia/pseuds/ataxophilia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Angelica’s wings first begin to grow in, delicate bones and downy feathers, Eliza and Peggy are the first to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the one who has to climb

**Author's Note:**

> This continues to be Swan's fault. 
> 
> Once more, this is not based on any extensive research, so its historical accuracy is probably pretty low, even when you take out the wings. 
> 
> Unbeta'd as per usual.

By the time Angelica Schuyler is two and a half, she has two little sisters.

As children they are inseparable: the terrors of their nannies and tutors, and the darlings of their parents’ friends. Each time Eliza tiptoes into the kitchens and steals a basket of freshly baked cakes, Angelica and Peggy are there to share them, and then back up her alibi when the cook comes looking. When Peggy is three she wades too far out into the creek a five-minute run from their house; it is Eliza who runs back for help, and Angelica who stays and holds the branch that Peggy clings to.

It's been the three of them, Angelica, Eliza and Peggy, together for as long as any of them can remember. They don’t know what it’s like to not have each other.

So when Angelica’s wings first begin to grow in, delicate bones and downy feathers, Eliza and Peggy are the first to know. 

 

* * *

 

Eliza is thrilled.

“Are you an angel, then, ‘Gelica?” she asks, trailing her fingers over the murky-grey feathers, soft and fluffy like the cygnets that float down the creek each spring. Angelica’s whole spine shivers. Eliza’s petting is a peculiar feeling, close to having her hair brushed but deeper, spreading through her back and between her ribs.

Peggy frowns, and reaches out to tug lightly on a single feather. “But we’re not in heaven,” she points out, which doesn’t seem to deter Eliza in the slightest, who is squinting at the top of Angelica’s head, trying to make out a halo.

Angelica just giggles; she is not as serious as her sisters, and still too young to fret about the religious implications of her newfound limbs. Their combined stroking is beginning to tickle, and when she flexes her shoulders under the touch the muscles in her wings stretch in the most delicious way. “I’m still your Angelica, either way,” she tells Peggy, ruffling Peggy’s hair and grinning and when Peggy buries her hand in her feathers in retaliation.

“Will they get bigger, do you think?” Angelica flexes, extends her wings out as far as they’ll go. They muscles already stretch wider than the span of Peggy’s outstretched arms, but the downy feathers make them look too small for Angelica.

“They must do,” Eliza says, dragging her fingers all the way to the tip of one wing. “These aren’t proper feathers, so they mustn’t be finished growing yet.”

Peggy’s face lights up. “Like a duckling!” she announces, clapping lightly. “Angelica the duckling!”

It’s already clear that Angelica won’t shake that nickname anytime soon, but she hardly cares; something more important occurs to her as Peggy dances delightedly. “By the time yours grow,” she says, catching Peggy’s shoulders so she can spread her hands over her back, “I’ll be able to fly.” 

“Oh,” Eliza breathes, her eyes widening in awe. Peggy stops wriggling under Angelica’s hands to turn and stare up at her. “Oh, Angelica, you’ll be able to _fly_.”

Their discussions about this new development keep them hidden away in their bedroom until long after the bell rings for dinner – until their mother comes to find them, and presses a shaking hand to her mouth, face pale, and drops to her knees to pull Angelica into a tight, desperate hug – and then proceeds to keep them awake each night for the next month.

 

* * *

 

Only—

Only Peggy’s shoulders never erupt into feathers.

 

* * *

 

For a year after Angelica wakes up with wings, Eliza examines her shoulders in the mirror every morning without fail, as regular as her evening prayers. And each morning her face falls when the mirror shows her nothing but smooth, lightly freckled skin.

The brush of her fingers through Angelica’s feathers, less downy now, becomes bittersweet. She stops drawing clumsy pictures of the three of them as angels, stops drawing pictures of them at all. The papers she hands to their mother every few days are full of stories, and of the view from their nursery window, and the little dog that their aunt brings with her on visits.

She keeps checking – but she sneaks away in the afternoons to do it alone, hoping that Angelica won’t notice.

Angelica notices.

She’s older, now, and while she still doesn’t quite realise the burden her wings will become, she understands a little better. Her mother has started trying to figure out a way to bind them down under her dresses so they won’t show when she goes into the city. Only one maid is allowed to help her get washed and dressed in the mornings and at night. Once, one of the cooks catches sight of Angelica without her wrappings, wings out, and Angelica watches wide-eyed as her mother grabs her and explains that she can’t tell anyone with an urgency that Angelica has never seen from her mother before.

The idea of flight is still intoxicating, but she’s not so sure it’s worth the fear it brings with it anymore.

 

* * *

 

When Peggy’s shoulders also stay unbroken, two years later, Angelica knows enough to be relieved on both her sisters’ behalfs, despite the disappointment leaking out of them, almost thick enough to be tangible, whenever they run their fingers through Angelica’s feathers.

 

* * *

 

Once three years have gone by they’ve given up checking each day. 

Angelica’s wings keep growing anyway, like they’re unaware that they’re one third of an incomplete set. By the time Peggy’s gone a whole month without once reaching back to her shoulder blades, Angelica’s wings stretch out past her fingertips.

Each morning Eliza cleans them while Angelica brushes and braids Peggy’s hair. Together they keep track of how much longer they grow through the years, how many new feathers have grown in. Any lingering bitterness between them fades quickly: Eliza is too sweet to blame Angelica for her own lack of feathers, and Peggy, so much more practical than her sisters, figures out that the wings are more of a curse than anything else much quicker than Angelica had.

They have to be bound down each day, now. Angelica rarely goes out without a heavy cloak thrown over her shoulders, to hide the way her dresses don’t quite fit her. She has learnt to flinch away from any touches that come too close to her back.

After the cook sees her, Angelica isn’t allowed to have her wings loose anywhere but the empty old attic at the top of the house, now forbidden ground for anyone but Angelica, Eliza and Peggy, and her bedroom. In bed she forgoes blankets in favour of curling up, folding her feathers, now a dark, tawny brown, smoother and sleeker than her baby tufts, around herself. 

Her mornings with Eliza and Peggy quickly become the only time she feels like her wings are something she can live with.

And then, finally, a little under four years after her feathers first push through her skin, Angelica sweeps her wings in the attic and her feet leave the floor. 

 

* * *

 

Eliza and Peggy come running as soon as she calls for them, tumbling through the attic door and then shouting with delight when they find Angelica still hovering unsteadily a foot or so in the air. 

“You are an angel!” Eliza tells her, as Angelica pushes herself higher, and reaches out to wrap a reverent hand around one of Angelica’s ankles as they sweep by her face. 

“Mama will have to let you outside now,” Peggy says, ever the pragmatist, and Angelica is so full of love for them both that she can’t say anything back, can only laugh and laugh and laugh as her wings grow accustomed to their new role. 

Their mother pulls herself up into the attic a handful of moments later, and her eyes cloud over with tears when she looks up at Angelica. “Oh, darling,” she breathes, opening her arms as Angelica barrels into her, wings beating steadily to keep her at the right height to bury her face in her mother’s neck. Her mother brings one hand up to cup the back of her head and presses the other to the shifting muscles between her wings. “My little miracle,” she whispers. “I knew you could do it.”

When Angelica’s wings falter, her mother catches her and sinks to her knees so that Angelica can stand. They stay pressed together for a heartbeat, and then Angelica lets go, Eliza and Peggy each clutching at one of her hands as she steps back slightly.

“Does this mean I can go out?” she asks, her excitement bleeding into her voice, making it shake. Peggy’s grip on her tightens so fast that Angelica almost worries her fingers will snap.

Their mother exhales shakily, lifting one hand to run her finger along Angelica’s cheek, and then smiles. It’s the same bright smile Angelica can already see on Eliza, sometimes. “I can hardly keep you inside now, can I?”

Eliza buries her delighted squeak in Angelica’s shoulder, her free hand twining into Angelica’s feathers.

“Just—” Their mother’s smile goes a little sad. She tucks Angelica’s hair behind her ear, trails her fingers down to Angelica’s shoulder. “Be careful. Be—be safe.”

Angelica swallows heavily, her fingers flexing in her sisters’ grips, and nods solemnly. “I will,” she promises, and, when her mother’s fingers tighten on her shoulder and then release her, she lets Eliza drag her out into the woods behind the house, her wings streaming out behind the three of them like a banner over the heads of an army.

 

* * *

 

Flying is everything Angelica has been dreaming of since it become a possibility, and so, so much more. It’s freedom, unadulterated. The skies in their entirety become hers to explore. She leaves Eliza and Peggy cheering on the ground beneath her and pushes herself up into the openness of it all, learns to twist through the branches of the trees, to lift herself high enough to see past their house to the city and then to dive back down, pulling up just before she hits leaves. 

For the first time since she gave up on her sisters growing matching pairs, her wings don’t feel like a weight on her back. 

(In the years to come – as she grows older and learns just how deeply being so different will cut her, as she starts to think about marriage, about the secret she is keeping and what it means for her prospects, as her heart starts to harden and her hope starts to fade, as she gives away the one man who would have understood for her sister’s happiness – this is the memory she holds onto: Eliza and Peggy’s faces split into smiles, the wind dancing through her hair and her skirts and her feathers, the clouds at her fingertips, the knowledge that now, in this moment, she truly is the miracle her mother has always claimed her to be.)

**Author's Note:**

> There's more! This little au is growing! Look at it go!
> 
> I do, in fact, have a handful of other scenes for this au planned out, and I promise they will be painful and heartwrenching and involve characters actually interacting with people outside their families. I just need to actually write them up. Please continue to bully/flatter me into getting on with it, and I will try and deliver!


End file.
